Flea Yatsenko

I tried lowering all my prices for a few months and it did nothing. I raised them closer to how they were and the last few weeks have been an improvement from the previous months. I have a bad feeling LL makes more money selling gatchas than they do original content from merchants selling traditional items and that's their focus now on search. And given how much money those stupid gacha mobile games make it wouldn't surprise me at all. They came out and said they were making more money with the new search and all you see is gacha. Starting to think SLMP is just a gacha search engine at this point.

Templates and starting items should be in the library folder for new users (and everyone else). It instantly tells new users that content is user created and they are encouraged to create content. 99% of them who try will probably fail but it changes the new user experience from "I'm going to dress up my AV" to "Woah I can make stuff and make money! I have a long term goal of things to do in SL" I highly doubt it's going to cannibalize other sales. People spend money to look unique in SL and a mesh body, no matter how nice, if anyone has access to it, it's just not very unique. It's just a matter of time until it becomes the "noob body" and people are spending money on different bodies. So it only really needs to be good for new users to get them involved with SL. NUX has a chance to show new users it's easy, fun, and profitable to create content for SL. A big chance to show new users what makes SL so unique (user generated content) is being squandered here. I mean if you want to get good user retention, showing a new user you can make money in SL and giving them what they need to get started is a great way to give them a long term goal to stay in SL and to keep them logging in.

I would hope that upgrading from an 11 year old CPU would give you a huge performance boost.

Nice job with the interface. Looks very touch friendly and very easy for someone who isn't a computer power user to navigate and find what they need. Extremely not overwhelming, which the mainline viewer is. The only thing that excited me more about SL than the mobile viewer was mesh. I still believe this has the chance to transform the SL userbase and see some huge growth. I also hope since it's Unity we can get some native Windows, OSX, and Linux builds out of this. I've wanted to see SL split into a simple "viewer" that only focuses on viewing the world and being welcoming to new users, and leaving the traditional client for power users and content creators. This really, legitimately looks great, thank you LL. SL has always had a problem with their viewer, if they make the mainline viewer more appealing for new users, the existing users revolt. I was there for the interface update everyone hated. But if they don't make it easier to use they're killing their new userbase. Unity viewer is awesome and I hope it buds into so much more than just a mobile viewer. Times have changed and computers are used by a much wider audience. Meaning everything needs to be simpler.

Why? You are excluding your customers who want the SL UV BOM and then adding a new feature that existing customers can't use. Best thing for the customers is to have an update that that adds support for EVO X. Best thing for you, it depends on how much you expect to make off of having an EVO X head. If you expect to make a lot it's worth it to just make it a free update since you've increased potential customers by including people who use SL UV and EVO X UV. Worst thing you can do is cancel the SL UV and replace it with EVO X while keeping it the same product. Then you have customers that say "I really love this head but they want me to buy new skins and change my whole AV for the new version" which really angers people. And if you make it a new product, you may lose a customer when they switch to EVO X UV. Then they have to buy a new head. Which means you probably lost a user instead of keeping one. And walking around looking good is basically free advertisement for AV stuff since anyone can source where it came from in world.

I never remove old stuff. I've had people complain that they couldn't find older stuff and they really wanted it. In my eyes it was totally out of date, early mesh work when I didn't really know what I was doing like I do now. But for them it was great. I would have left the old version alone, maybe added some more body type support depending on how well it was still selling, then made a new product with materials instead of baked on shine. It's kinda weird but sometimes people still like the older tech, even full bright baked stuff. I don't know why. But they do and it's not worth updating a new product to alienate customers.

I don't think that's what SL prefers, I think it's what users have to do because of input latency to move your avatar, lag when someone enters a sim/server, etc. Moving around SL simply isn't as fun and enjoyable as it is in other games. I'm sure you know the technical reasons why, but for those that don't they focused on making SL more accurate between clients (i.e. everyone sees the same thing on a screen) as opposed to most games who just update the best they can and guess (like with avatar/character positions). Surely you've seen characters jumping around in other games when it gets laggy, yet when SL is laggy you just can't move.

Sounds like they want to make tools for other people to make their own virtual worlds with instead of creating their own virtual world. Guess they found a way to make money off of virtual worlds, sell the tools to make them to people who'll either make proprietary niche virtual worlds (think training scenarios, etc) or people who want to make social virtual worlds that end up dead after people realize there's no content and you end up running into people who look the exact same as you.

Not to be rude, but you are telling a bunch of power users, who are so involved with SL that they sign up on forums to talk about SL, how to use the search engine's advanced features to find what they want. Do you think the average user would do all this? Do you think a new user would do any of that? Imagine trying to show a friend SL and how to find stuff. So they search and find stuff that looks like it's from a very outdated game. They think SL is a bunch of outdated stuff and looks old, then you tell them they just aren't using search right. Not going to go well, I guarantee it, unless your friend is very patient. But with hundreds of thousands of games out there who cares about being patient for one? The fact that the biggest power users in SL, forums users and content creators, can't get the search engine to work right makes me feel it's the search that's the problem. SLMP search right now is like if you went to amazon and searched for "legend of zelda" and it showed you the original NES legend of zelda instead of the switch one, because "legend of zelda" is more relevant than "legend of zelda breath of the wild." And instead of listening to complains about the the results being outdated, you just told people the search was working fine and they just had to search better. Or imagine you search for "Joe Biden" on Google and all it does is show you results from 30 years ago when he was a senator and all the modern stuff is buried in results. And the response is "just add some filters!" Are those results relevant? Yes. Are they useful? Absolutely not. And just so you know, this is why when they brought in Google search it failed on SLMP too. A store doesn't need relevant results, it needs relevant and USEFUL results. The text and listing has very little to do with if a product is good or not. Sorry for the rant, and thank you for folks who said kind words about my creations. I really do appreciate it, especially in these times. But yes, I'm beyond frustrated, demoralized. Why do I spend tens of hours making in depth builds when I can just slop together old stuff and have it make more L$? I'm actually quite demoralized, because the way SLMP search is right now it discourages higher quality content and prioritizes lower quality content (even in my own store, not jabbing on anyone), which incentivizes making lower quality content. And really, why am I gonna spend time making some complex build with PBR and normals properly baked and all this stuff when old full bright baked stuff is selling the best? It's sad really. SL is amazing, I legit love the platform, and PBR and the new rendering engine is going to be amazing. But if people can't find content for pbr because the main way to find content is suggesting you buy full bright baked, sculpty, and who knows what else then what's even the point of using any new tech? I'm so demoralized I'm not even excited about PBR. I was going to make a ton of new products and get them ready for PBR, then dump them all at once. But I started working a second job IRL because I don't see SLMP providing the returns on my time invested. And honestly I think they just want SL to be an avatar dress up platform at this point because that's obviously where all the money is now.

This horse has been beaten to death. I'm making something but I'm not spilling the beans yet, but I think people will be pretty happy. I am happy so far and it's a very rough draft.

If only that's how it worked but that's not a good enough keyword. Plenty of very outdated products that are made of mesh. It's terrible, I only sell low end, outdated products now and don't sell anything new. So I don't even bother uploading new products. I tried doing a huge sale to lower the cost of my more expensive, high end products and it made zero difference. No one is finding them in search. Just looking through search and going back pages and pages there's lots of quality stuff buried between 2 LI caves and sculpties even though you're searching for mesh. I worry the old, bad items are still selling enough to taint any sort of data they have about product sales. I.E. someone's outdated stuff shows up on page 1, people buy it because they don't know any better, then it gets ranked higher in search because it's selling more. It's obviously going to scare away new users, because anything they look for will be outdated, and by extension make SL look outdated. You can say "well what about boolean operators and changing sorting and all these other features" but newbies aren't going to know and aren't going to care. Do you think a new user to SL who is trying to search for stuff their first time knows to search for mesh and material instead of sculpties? They have no clue. I just accepted it, they aren't going to fix it. It's still early but I'm gonna fix it, I'll say more later. I was patient at least.

dupe post, sorry

I don't think there's any reason for them to release it before PBR is released. Why would they have people making spec+normal content for a new body only for it to be replaced by PBR? Makes more sense to release the body after PBR is released. New body with PBR is going to really make Nux stand out. They probably want a hard reset on avatars, i.e. using Nux means you'll get PBR clothing and stuff. No more baked shiny clothes and metal, etc. I imagine LL has a roadmap for new projects to completely bring SL's graphics up to date and it completely revolves around the new AV and PBR.

Yeah, the results for the keywords I'm targeting are still borked too. How disappointing. I've been working a second job to make up for lost revenue, hopefully Lindens think of me outside spreading mulch and doing landscape work because search is broken.

I wonder if that changed with the infrastructure upgrades. I know they were talking about moving beyond the top 50k. The top selling products report is almost useless, it is lifetime. So if you've had a product that's been around for 10 years and sold 100 times it gets ranked higher in that report than your new successful product that has sold 75 times in a week. The only thing that report is good for is referencing date the product was released and calculating how many sales per day a product has had.

I've got some scripts that require parsing the product ID from my store listings. I've noticed a pretty big discrepancy where the product IDs in a URL in a store do not match the ones in the listing manager. Example: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/FYI-Mesh-Sky-Island-Cave-Platforms/24837657 is the product link, but when you view it in the store my link is https://marketplace.secondlife.com/s/FYI-Mesh-Sky-Island-Cave-Platforms/24810571 which then redirects to https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/FYI-Mesh-Sky-Island-Cave-Platforms/24837657 So, my question is why? And is this intentional? It's completely broken some stuff I use. I mean, I fixed it with a workaround but it seems kind of wasteful to have a redirect for each individual item, doesn't it? Only happens when you are viewing listings on public facing areas, like search results. Doesn't seem to affect featured listings and stuff.

SL does have a problem. It's not nearly as bad as it's made out to be. But normally content creator to consumer ratio is 1:100. SL has far more creators than consumers, which is why there's so much built stuff that sits empty.

well that's a good sign. I was pretty discouraged when I went to see this thread was made in 2020 and the problem still persists. But they must be aware of it and about to do something. Optimistically maybe they've been having problems because they don't have the hardware to properly sort, index, etc all the listings that exist.

All SL web properties throw random 500 errors.

The uploader is also not very useful for LODing. Depending on object size, some might never see medium LOD before it drops out of view distance and some might make lowest LOD at 5m. You can either 1. Just do the high LOD and set everything besides high to 0 in the uploader 2. Create LODs for everything when some won't even be used which can increase LI There really needs to be a full preview you can walk around and test different view distances on in the mesh preview. And something to indicate color wise when the LOD changes. SL doesn't incentivize making proper LODs at all. Granted there is some very obvious mis-use of LODs, but the only way to really do it right and not waste LI while not having your stuff turn into visible triangles is to upload in world, walk around and inspect everything, then do LODs for whatever degrades poorly. It's a huge time sink and given how the cost of products is dropping for a lot of goods, it's no wonder people don't take LODing seriously. Regardless it's something that should be fixed, especially because poorly done LODs aren't something you see in a marketplace listing. And if there's no in world demo, you can easily buy stuff that is useless depending on what you want to use it for.

The whole idea of deactivating stores that have items that don't sell and the store owner hasn't been online in two years is to get dead listings out of the way so people who are still active do not have to fight through so many dead listings. If SLMP is showing your products on a page filled with merchants who haven't been in here in 5 years. what works better for the customer? Buying from someone who is active or buying from someone who is gone forever? When search was Search is really messed up, the items showing up for keywords I am targeting are absolutely out dated, very high land impact, very old. When you list a new product, it ends up at the back of search with all the dead stuff with dead creators. It takes power users to find your product and start buying it for it to move anywhere in search rankings. The less irrelevant and old products SLMP has to sort and index the easier it is for SLMP to show you relevant products.

There are a lot of people on SL. The odds of something not selling once in two years and the creator not logging in in two years is awfully low if it's anything more than gestures, poorly done photoshop textures, etc. I did a random sampling of stores by changing the store ID at the end of the store URL. A lot of stores don't even have any items for sale. Some had things like Beethoven songs broken up into 10 second clips in a player. Some had some textures that look like they just put text on existing textures in MSPaint. There was a lot of very rough stuff. There are no barriers to entry to opening up a store except for upload costs. Meaning there's a ton of people who randomly decide to open up a store. I think you misunderstood the AND in there, meaning if someone makes a store and they don't sell anything for two years, but in the last two years they did log in, their store will still not be unlisted. OR if someone hasn't logged in in 5 years but they managed to sell something they won't be delisted.

We just went through months of SLMP search being completely borked and showing outdated and irrelevant results. The more bad listings SLMP team has to sift through to give you good search results, the more difficult it is for them to show you relevant products. I don't think people realize how many stores and products exist from people who tried making a store, tried making a few products, they never sold, and SLMP has to index and organize them all. I still sell sculpty stuff to this day. People are buying older products, whether by mistake or by choice. You can poke around random stores by changing the number at the end of a store URL. I spent time doing it, for every one legitimate store with something remotely worth buying there's 3 stores selling gestures, 3 selling songs (some of which are old and no longer have copyright), very poorly done textures done in photoshop, etc. I really don't think people understand how much old stuff and failed stores are on SLMP. People complain about search being bad and all this stuff, of course it's bad when SLMP has to index and organize stuff from 14 years ago that hasn't been bought ever. This hurts customers just as much as merchants. Someone new to SL who goes to search for something and sees outdated old stuff is going to give up. I used to think history was being deleted too until I started visiting random stores by the URL and store ID. I hate to sound rude but, well, this cleaning isn't as serious as you think it is.

Oh no, the store itself would just have to release one item in the last year for all items to be in a higher status. I.E. if you have something that's 10 years old and it hasn't sold in the last year, if you released anything on SLMP in the last year all of your products maintain status. SLMP just needs checks to see who is active and who isn't. If Maitreya hasn't released anything in over a year and they were going to be penalized, they'd be active creators and they'd just post something to stay active. But mesh body stores don't usually sell their bodies on SLMP either. I really don't think that's unreasonable to ask for anything to be listed in one year if you're still an active creator and around in SL. Right now SLMP is 13+ years of products and SLMP team has to sort through all of that to show customers relevant stuff. Their job is gonna be a lot easier to get people good stuff that they're looking for if they can find it. 50k limit exists because there's simply so much stuff they're trying to sort. It needs to be filtered in some way to make it easier to sort. My point about 50k is that low quality avatar components will sell better than high quality niche things simply because there's more demand for avatar components. I don't think people understand how massive SLMP sorting and search is and how cutting out older stuff (and making it optional) would help active content creators and customers. They also need to implement the single listing for multiple variants thing, because having one search document for 15 different colors is a lot easier to search through than 15 different very similar Elasticsearch documents. I mean I'm usually a pretty humble guy but my other project is a web thing based on elasticsearch with 1.5m requests a month. No way you can ever have a reliable search engine with so much old and nearly duplicate stuff listed. That said I think deleting is a horrible idea. They do spring cleaning to reduce the overhead and stuff they have to sort through and try and make sense of when someone searches. I'm just proposing instead of deleting stuff, to make their job a little less impossible, is they move stuff to legacy status on SLMP and they do so more aggressively than they are currently deleting things in spring clean up. Dates and stuff I'm suggesting could obviously be changed. But I think there's a better way to reduce what they have to search through than deleting old stuff forever.

Basically, if they've logged in OR sold something in the last year, their store is untouched. I think they should go further, disable those stores AND then make a checkbox that's on by default to only search active stores where the user has logged on in the last year and created new listings. With the last marketplace update and only the top 50k items being given preferential treatment, people who make more niche stuff than avatar apparel are going to have a massive disadvantage. And FYI 50k items isn't all that much when you consider how many color variations and versions the huge avatar clothing/shape/skin/etc stores have. I don't think people realize the scale of marketplace. My store has been around for a long time, over 10 years, and my store ID is 28761. Meaning like 14 years ago when I started there were already 28,760 stores created on XStreetSL, this was before SLMP was even a thing. Actually, just typing in random IDs and the end of https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/, I made it a little more than 250,000 before I ran out of stores. Meaning there's over 250,000 stores ever created (not active). After SLMP going through a phase of "we're going to sell your 12 year old stuff and bury your new stuff at the back of search", I'm all for giving people filters to find newer stuff. I don't want to see it nuked though, SL has a huge history in the internet, they were doing metaverses before they were the trendy startup buzzword. That old content should be archived or kept around just for history's sake. SLMP has a serious problem with pushing outdated products over newer ones. It hurts creators, and it hurts customers because they're seeing outdated stuff.